Earlier this year, the Utah Legislature passed HB267, Public Sector Labor Union Amendments. The legislation stripped all Utah public employees of their right to engage in collective bargaining with their employers, despite very vocal opposition across all labor sectors.
Utah citizens rallied together to collect signatures for a referendum to let voters decide the fate of collective bargaining in the public sector, and we were elated on April 17, when Protect Utah Workers announced the group collected over 320,000 signatures to get a referendum against HB267 on the ballot.
Despite that bit of good news, on April 10 Justice John Roberts issued a stay, to pause the reinstatement of National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox today amid multiple court cases challenging the board’s structure.
Wilcox was the first board member to be fired since the NLRB’s inception 90 years ago. She sued the president, and has since been reinstated twice by a federal district court in Washington, D.C., rulings which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals also upheld.
Without her reinstatement, the NLRB is unable to form a quorum and therefore is unable to issue decisions.
The decision by Roberts is a potentially ominous foreboding of the many legal battles challenging the NLRB’s constitutionality and what I believe is an inevitability — that the Supreme Court will ultimately deem their board structure unconstitutional, which will have significant implications for labor law and worker’s rights.
They want us to fight a culture war so we don’t unite to fight a class war.
Don’t let that happen.
Liz Miller, South Salt Lake
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